Hands-on Rhetoric, Teaching & Craft in a Digitized World

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The Problem with Kintsugi as a Self-Improvement Metaphor

This week a student in Erik Scollon‘s “Craft as Social Justice” course truly inspired me with her project on the ethics and aesthetics of mending. She used the ceramic gold-mending technique kintsugi as her central inspiration for a call to action that challenges her audience–artists and amateurs alike–to deploy their ingenuity to preserve and honor well-worn objects.

I spent much of the afternoon reflecting on ways I could apply this metaphor to my own life, highlighting and respecting inevitable cracks and fissures–in my own body, relationships, possessions, sociopolitical institutions–rather than attempting to conceal, reject, or ignore them. Kintsugi is about fixing things, yes, but it’s also about identifying ruptures and filling them with beauty.

As a digital storytelling activist I help people reclaim personal experiences, often tender ones, remaking them as attentively crafted, durable narratives. The tellers weave together fragments of memory stored in old photographs, crinkled love notes, scuffed boots. We call it storywork but it is also a form of kintsugi. Piecing together the past. Healing an old wound by telling the tale of the scar.

It is so natural, so tempting, to adopt kintsugi as a metaphor for living better in the new year ahead. But there are so many ruptures all around us. If we were to spend each day finding one precious thing and mending it we would never have time to make something new. And most precious things cannot be mended in a day. And mending doesn’t happen just once, especially not if the thing is returned to use. And preservation is about how we use things, not just about how we mend them.

So I wonder if perhaps what kintsugi is teaching me (today at least) is to focus not on the fissures or on the mending but on the gold. Perhaps the metaphor I need is that of beauty–or better yet, craftsmanship itself–as a way to bring people and things together.